An Educational-Philosophical Meaning of Death Education

ABSTRACT

In general, death education is discussed only to the extent of the biological death of human beings. However, this study affirms the death education as a huge 'death image syndrome', an unavoidable experience of falling. This insight becoming the base, the death education will be a crucial factor for the holistic education.This paper proposed a new era of death education which has been forgotten from the modern viewpoint. In addition, it examined the meaning of 'education of death', which plays a role of a new starting out of the modern education. The scope of death is defined by how it is viewed and understood. This 'interpretation of death' makes the modern education understood within the scope of the modern time, and at the same time, makes it escape from the modern education itself. Accordingly, education on death is an 'antithesis‘of the modern civilization and innovates ideas on educational reality. This transformative time and space is the shared area of contemplation which has been a forbidden boundary in the modern time. It is a new area of possibility towards the human history of infinite competition.Death Education has been forbidden and buried as a fundamental limit of the modern educational structure. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the reality of the education on death from the viewpoint of fundamental education. Death is an image of failure and disappearance in the modern time, and the deviation of this structure causes enormous horror and anxiety. In this regard, the scope of the modern education cannot include the forbidden area, driving children only one direction. However, death is a boundary of anguish and contemplation from which a human being overcomes the reality of death and leaps into the sacred world. The realization of death education in the structure of modern education will provide us with an important focus where we can explore a fundamentally important meaning of education. Death Education settles a new area of public education, and restores the original meaning of education, exploring the original humanity out of the artificial civilization. An important factor for the discussion on death is that education is not conducted just for a few success-makers. Rather, education is to find out numerous ways to overcome the crisis of death. The world of death is a forbidden area in the modern time, but it is a new starting area of education that can give opportunities of life for numerous children isolated from the human history.